Antec Neopower 650W Blue Power Supply Review | ||
| by Michael "SKYMTL" Hoenig | October 19, 2007 | ||
| Voltage Regulation Testing Voltage Regulation Testing To test voltage regulation I used the same tests as the efficiency. All tests were done over two tests of 1 hour where the voltage drops were logged with the Fluke 187 multimeter. The multimeter was installed directly on a connected PCI-E connector for the +12V tests and a SATA connector for the +5V and +3.3V tests. The tests were as follows: The “Idle” value was done with an overclocked processor and the graphics card at stock speeds while running the Windows Desktop. The “Load” value was done with an overclocked processor and the graphics card at stock speeds while running Company of Heroes. The “Load (OC)” value was done with an overclocked processor and a heavily overclocked (both 2D and 3D overclocked to the same value) graphics card. Company of Heroes was played while Orthos was running on the processor in the background. The “Load (SLI)” value was run with 2 8800GTS 320MB cards in SLI running at stock speeds with the processor overclocked to 2.6Ghz. Company of Heroes was then run for 1 hour to determine load values. The “SLI OC” test was run with 2 8800GTS 320MB cards running in SLI and overclocked to 650/1800. Company of Heroes was played for 30 minutes while the overclocked processor (at 2.6Ghz) ran Orthos in the background. In addition, HDtach was looped in the background and a full DVD was burned as well. +5V / +3.3V Voltage Regulation: Once again, I am going to keep this short and sweet; because I do not have (and the typical user does not have either) enough components that draw power from the +5V and +3.3V rails in order to stress them. Thus, I did conduct the tests with the system I had and the Neopower Blue 650W passed every test within +/- 2% of 5V / 3.3V. +12V Voltage Regulation  Voltage regulation is absolutely top notch with barely any movement in the +12V rail readings throughout my tests. For the price Antec is offering for this power supply, it just simply doesn’t get any better than this when it comes to stability.         | ||
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